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John Richardson has been assigned a privileged position within the English-Canadian literary tradition, frequently being cited as a seminal figure (“The Father of Canadian Literature,” “Canada’s First Novelist,” etc., see M. Hurley 3, 9). This position is nearly entirely based upon his first major novel, Wacousta (1832), which, as I have argued elsewhere, has “served as an historical anchor” for teachers and critics “who wished to establish the existence of a specific tradition within Canadian literature” (“English Canadian” 40). As a “‘foundational’ text,” as Peter Dickinson describes it, Wacousta’s inclusion in comprehensive studies of Canadian literature like Dickinson’s Here is Queer “would seem inevitable” (12), and its “mythical status in Canadian studies” (Kuester 32) is reflected in its adoption as the name of “syndromes” and “factors” that seek to explain Canadian literature and culture (McGregor , R. Mathews). Wacousta’s prominence, however, has left its 1840 sequel, The Canadian Brothers, in its shadow, seeing it much less frequently taught and written on, despite its status as the second half of what Catherine Sheldrick Ross has described as a “sort of national epic” (12). The result of this relative lack of attention is that The Canadian Brothers is often valued simply as an adjunct to or extension of its predecessor, in which Richardson is seen to be reworking, with less success, the same ground rather than developing it further. For instance, writing in the Literary History of Canada, Carl F. Klinck dismissed The Canadian Brothers as “uninspired” (137), and in A History of Canadian Literature, W.H. New devotes virtually all of his discussion of Richardson to Wacousta (78-79). Yet, although The Canadian Brothers Notes are on pages 175-76. 162 D O U G L A S I V I S O N “I too am a Canadian”: John Richardson’s The Canadian Brothers as Postcolonial Narrative continues the family history of its predecessor, its action takes place in a radically different context—social, political, military, and spatial— than that of its predecessor, and thus its relevance is, in many ways, distinct from that of Wacousta. In his 1920 survey of early English-Canadian literature, Ray Palmer Baker described The Canadian Brothers as “the most significant of [Richardson’s] romances” (133-34) and “one of the most significant books of its time. As an early attempt to give expression to the spirit of nationality it has a definite place in Canadian literature” (135). The Canadian Brothers negotiates the attractions and might of the United States and traditional allegiances to Britain and, in doing so, anticipates the struggle to articulate a distinct Canadian identity and space. Working through a different problematic—a different series of contexts, conflicts, and relationships—than Wacousta, The Canadian Brothers provides its readers with a vision of the relationships between individuals, peoples, and nations that is distinct from that of its predecessor. To illustrate this distinction, I begin with a brief discussion of Wacousta, and will return to that novel throughout, as a contrast to The Canadian Brothers. In The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin contentiously include the literatures of settler societies such as Australia, Canada, and even the United States, in their discussion of “post-colonial” literatures. In the past decade some critics have taken up this suggestion in discussing Wacousta. Margaret E. Turner, for example, describes Wacousta as being paradigmatic of the settler perspective in its representation of the “new world space” and the contact and conflict between European settlers and the First Nations peoples being displaced. According to Turner, in Wacousta Richardson is caught in the second-world postcolonial condition of not being able to “find a space for himself” as a result of being “caught between two modes of thinking and being” (18). The story told in Wacousta, she argues, is that of “the imaginative construction of the new world” (23), one that is central to the “new world discourse” her book describes. Other critics have read Wacousta not so much as a postcolonial text but as an example of colonial discourse.1 Manina Jones discusses “Richardson ’s ambivalent colonial discourse” in Wacousta (“Beyond the Pale” 48) and observes that Wacousta “is a novel in which the managing of empire and the negotiation of cultural difference” is foregrounded (46), although the colonial project is disrupted, and simultaneously reinforced , by the text’s inability to restrain and contain Ellen Halloway’s ghostly and unassimilatable otherness (48-49). Similarly, S. Leigh John Richardson’s The Canadian...

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